D.C. Is Debbie Dingell’s Town

Earlier this winter, Debbie Dingell made time for a chat over lunch at Bistro Bis, a Capitol Hill watering hole not far from the office of her husband, Michigan Rep. John Dingell. The longest-serving member of Congress in American history, John Dingell, 87, had yet to make his February announcement that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection. Debbie, who keeps a hectic and varied schedule, was due after lunch to collect “Big John,” (as the Congressman is sometimes called) and take him—kicking and screaming, one sensed—to see a nutritionist.

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“I’m tired of saying: ‘Honey, that has too much salt,’” confided Dingell, who at 60 years old is more than a quarter-century younger than her husband, and speaks with some nostalgia of the days, thirty-odd years ago, when their romance was an item of scandalized gossip. But Debbie Dingell is not now, nor has she ever been, some trophy wife caretaker to a powerful older man. Instead, she has long since established herself as a D.C. power player in her own right; an insider who serves as her husband’s chief political aide and protector; who left the Republican Party, for his sake, to become a Democrat; who established herself as a force in her new party, both in Michigan and nationally; who shared the marriage’s breadwinning duties; and who generally proved a committed and formidable partner. “The lovely Deborah” is what her husband calls her. “John and I are a team more than most people are a team,” is how she puts it. And there’s no reason to think John’s retirement means the team is getting out of the game.

To the contrary: Shortly after John announced that “Debbie and I” would be leaving Congress, which he portrayed as paralyzed by rancor and dysfunction, Mrs. Dingell confirmed suspicion that she would run for the seat he was vacating—a political perch the family has occupied continuously since John’s father went to Congress in 1933. John joined him there as a page—he was on the floor of the House in 1941 when Congress declared war on Japan—and succeeded his father, in 1955, after John Dingell Sr., died.

Last month, when she announced her candidacy to succeed John, Debbie acknowledged the family’s legacy of service. “There is no one in this district—no one—who has a better sense of just how big his shoes will be to fill,” she said in a statement, adding, with wifely irony, that she knows this because “I’m the one who does the shoe shopping.” It was a flash of the charm that has made her popular in the living rooms, influence corridors, and private banquet halls of modern D.C., where she has staked a claim as the ultimate spousal multitasker: part old-fashioned party hostess, part campaign manager, part modern-day workaholic. In other words, it hasn’t been shoe shopping that’s occupied Debbie’s time, or given her entrée to the vast web-work of the city’s influence profession. If you saw her in action, you’d be forgiven for thinking she’s been in Congress for years; in a number of ways you might say she’s already more powerful than a lot of actual members of the House. It may be the famed Dingell family seat she’s hoping to hold, but Debbie has charted a political path for herself that’s uniquely her own.

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In some ways, the job Debbie Dingell now wants would be simpler than the various roles she’s recently played, which have involved—among other things—television punditry; political strategizing for her husband and others; throwing parties; holding civic posts; and working on behalf of the auto industry, which is literally her family business. Debbie, once a lobbyist for General Motors, long ago forsook that formal title, but has stayed close to the car business—like many in Washington, she manages to be an influencer while tending to deny or understate the extent of her influence. And while it’s true that the commute from K Street to Capitol Hill that she hopes to make is an unusual one (typically lawmakers move in the other, more lucrative direction) the ascension from political wife to politician is not uncommon.

Debbie Dingell and her husband John Dingell on the day he announced his retirement from Congress last month. | Getty Images

Taking over one’s husband’s seat is a time-honored way by which women have found their way into Congress—historically, it was one of the only ways women could get there. Lindy Boggs got to Congress when her husband, Hale, at the time the House majority leader, was killed in a plane crash. According to David Hawkings, a columnist for Roll Call, nearly one out of six women who have come to Congress did so as widows. Many of these served out their husband’s terms as caretakers of the seat, while others went on to have real legislative careers. Debbie, who would be the first wife to directly succeed a living member of Congress, represents a more modern version, not so much inheriting his mantle by accident but purposefully assuming responsibility for the marital brand. She is an avatar of the new turn-taking political marriage, in which two politically active spouses exponentially increase the power of a single political name. In this way the obvious comparison is to Hillary Clinton, but there are at least two keys ways in which they differ. The first, obvious difference is that Debbie Dingell lacks Hillary’s celebrity star power; the second is that coming in, she would have a better sense than Hillary Clinton did of how the legislative game works.

“When [Hillary] got to the Senate, she had a learning curve—Bill had never served in a legislative body,” points out Jennifer Duffy, a senior editor with the Cook Political Report. “Being married to somebody who lived and breathed this stuff, and was sort of a tactician in his own right—even if [Debbie Dingell] wasn’t paying attention, which she was, she would have learned something by osmosis.”

Voting for Debbie isn’t necessarily a vote to prolong John’s career, however. Should Dingell win, she will lack the institutional standing of her husband. During his 58-year career in Congress, John Dingell ascended the House seniority ladder to become one of its most powerful members, culminating in his lengthy chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Not only would Debbie be a freshman member; she would come in to—quite likely—a Republican-controlled House. “She’s not going to be her husband—she’s not going to have his reputation and history, she’s going to be a lowly minority freshman grubworm,” says Bill Ballenger, a political analyst and founder of Inside Michigan Politics, a political newsletter and website. “Frankly I don’t know how seriously John Boehner and the Republicans will feel they have to take her.”

But she has assets that could make her more effective than her freshman colleagues, should she win the job of representing Michigan’s 12th District, which is considered likely. When John Dingell announced his departure, he cited what has now become a truism about Washington: that bipartisan comity has broken down; that nobody can get along or get anything done; that trying to pass laws in Washington has become, as he put it, “obnoxious.” Debbie Dingell has spent the past three decades rubbing shoulders, socializing, politicking, attending public functions, smiling through marches in parades. In many ways, this readies her as well as anything could for today’s poisoned political climate. Coming to Capitol Hill from a background like Debbie’s, one that—to paraphrase her—involves bringing people together, means she’s probably equipped to make her way in a dysfunctional system. The social skills of a hostess may be just what Washington needs at the present moment. “I agree that you can’t do much about the seniority system,” says Duffy, “but at the same time, she is a little bit set apart from that—because she does have relationships, she knows how the system works.”

Indeed she does—and she hasn’t been afraid to tangle with her husband’s staff to impose her political will. In 2002, redistricting threw him in opposition to another incumbent Democrat, Lynn Rivers, in a primary fight. Debbie, who saw the heated contest coming before some others did (“Everybody thought I was neurotic”), had what she admits was a famous “screaming match” with a staffer who, she believed, was not taking the electoral challenge seriously. “This was his toughest race in a long, long time,” remembers Duffy, and “she was incredibly involved.”

Across the decades, Debbie served, she says, as John’s number one “political person.” She concedes that this did not always endear her in his office. “The staff-spouse relationship is always very delicate,” she told me, delicately.

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When Debbie arrived in Washington as Deborah Ann Insley in the early 1970s, it was a different town and worked in a much different way. The Detroit native took both an undergraduate and master’s degree at Georgetown University. As the granddaughter of one of the founders of GM’s Fisher Body division (her grandfather was the youngest Fisher brother) she comes from auto industry royalty—a connection that served her well when she started at GM as a research analyst and lobbyist.

“I remember her in the ’70s,” recalls Ballenger, who was in Washington at the time, working for the Ford administration, and says that Debbie earned a reputation for being organized and hard-working. “She was already pretty aggressive, and moving around and making contacts and getting well known—she probably barely knew who [John] Dingell was. She probably would have become a force in her own right, even without John Dingell, but I don’t think it hurt her, particularly within the Democratic Party.” According to well-known lore, the two met in the first-class cabin on a plane between Washington and Detroit; Debbie, in her twenties, was freaked out by the turbulence, and Dingell tried to calm her. The congressman pursued her; she resisted; he kept asking her out. The story goes that she gave in when he finally proffered ballet tickets. In 1981 they married.

In those days, congressional wives rarely worked in an independent job, but Debbie was determined to, even if it meant exclusion from clubs whose doyennes couldn’t understand why work might require a woman to miss a meeting. “I always wanted to have a career,” Debbie told me, saying the reason she stayed at General Motors for more than 30 years is because she’d been there before her marriage. “Nobody could say I got hired because of John.”

According to Dingell, she has not lobbied in 33 years—and indeed, is not registered as one. She intensely resents the fact that she and her husband have “long been seen as one of Capitol Hill’s most public conflicts of interest,” as a recent NPR blog post put it. She argues that she has been nothing if not punctilious and careful: when she started out, there was no map for how a working spouse should comport herself, particularly one working for an American institution—GM—regulated by her husband’s institution, Congress. She told me she was “paranoid” about the appearance of professional impropriety and hired a lawyer to advise her. Eventually, she left lobbying when she married, but not General Motors, serving instead as head of public affairs and president of the company’s philanthropic foundation. She stayed there until 2009, when the company declared bankruptcy. She says that leaving broke her heart. “I loved GM. And I would not have left GM if it had not been for what happened. That would have been my career path,” she said. “It was really hard for me when I left.... I loved being part of the corporate culture. I loved working seven days a week; I loved the challenge.” Her work, Dingell says, helped her maintain a distinct identity. “At General Motors, I was me. Everybody knew I was smart,” she says. “Smart, passionate and intense. Nobody thought I was anything because of John. I was known for me.”

But she didn’t sever her ties with the company. Instead, she went to work on behalf of GM, Ford and Chrysler at the American Automotive Policy Council. According to a 2010 Washington Postprofile, Debbie’s assignment was to “devise a public education campaign to promote manufacturing and the auto industry.” Though a specific job description is hard to come by, Dingell is said to chair the AAPC’s manufacturing initiative and serve as a senior adviser to the group—she also runs her own eponymous consulting firm called D2 Strategies, which does work for the AAPC as well. A spokesperson for her stressed that she does not lobby for the trade organization, but advises on manufacturing strategy, “particularly as it relates to keeping jobs in the country.” So there you go.

As for whether she thinks being married to a member of Congress has been a professional asset or liability for her, the answer is more forthcoming. “Liability,” she offers, without hesitating. “Not that I’m complaining.” For example, Dingell says, she was afraid to sell her GM stock even as the company’s bankruptcy loomed. “I lost a lot of money at the end,” she told me. The Post’s 2010 story concluded that the “Dingells have always been open about their relationship, and the evidence is that they have always complied with the rules.” The public audit appears to have both traumatized her and offered her a measure of vindication. “I ended up on the front page of the Washington Post,” she says, sounding still a little wounded. “And they couldn’t find anything.”

Even now, she seems to be arguing with anybody who says she owes her standing to her husband. “I proved my own value… I knew what I was doing, and delivered.”

Of course, there are people who howl with laughter at the idea that Dingell has done anything but benefit from her husband’s career; for some, the Dingells epitomize what one observer I spoke with calls the “limitless tangle of access and influence” that characterize Washington. Once an anomaly within Congress’s highly traditional spousal culture, Dingell is now a fixture on what has become a much more varied scene—hosting birthday parties at trendy restaurants, attending innumerable lunches and sharing friendships with the spouses of lawmakers across the political spectrum. “She’s all about her female friends,” says D.C. native Susanna Quinn, who is one of those friends. For the past 20 years, Dingell has co-hosted an annual “friendship luncheon,” a D.C. tradition whereby female heavy-hitters—philanthropists, socialites, publishers, consultants, doctors, high-level administration officials, former Cabinet secretaries, power-spouses—come together for a bipartisan expression of holiday spirit.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, she chairs the board of governors at Wayne State University, among other civic posts. “Debbie Dingell is kind of an institution by herself,” says Ballenger. Independent of her husband, she has been plenty politically active. She was involved in the presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Al Gore, and represents Michigan on the Democratic National Committee. In 2008, she was part of the party-defying push to move up the date of Michigan’s Democratic primary, a bid to shake up the presidential primary scheme and make Michigan more important in the process. Her allegiances in that election were closely watched. “She was a covert Hillary supporter,” says Ballenger, maintaining neutrality but “maneuvering behind the scenes.” At the time, he says, it was thought a change of date would benefit Hillary, but the effort created procedural havoc and earned resentment among some Obama supporters. Ballenger points out that after a string of recent Democratic losses in state races, Debbie was “part of the palace coup” that ousted the longtime state Democratic party chairman, an effort that ruffled a few feathers. (A Dingell spokesperson noted that she was “not a leader” in that effort.)

Before announcing her candidacy to succeed her husband, she considered—and rejected—seeking the Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democrat Carl Levin. And from the moment she jumped in this race, Ballenger says, she has wisely worked her connections in Michigan to gin up early support. “One of the things she’s done very cleverly,” he says, “is gather up endorsements from a lot of incumbent and former state-level politicians, state legislators, some of whom might have been expected to challenge her for the seat.”

There is irony in the fact that a woman is able to harness the power of her husband’s incumbency to keep other women out. But such is the nature of the shrewd politics Debbie is playing in Michigan: state Sen. Rebekah Warren from Ann Arbor considered challenging Dingell in the primary, but demurred. Even so, you could argue that there is poetic justice in the fact that a woman who has devoted herself to the old-fashioned culture of social bipartisanship is now able to apply it to her own purposes. “People don’t know each other,” says Dingell, speaking of modern political Washington. “I work really hard to try to bring people together.” A Democrat who used to be a Republican; a political candidate who used to be a political wife; a politician who used to be a lobbyist; a woman who has made her way in a town of men: If new methods must be found to reach bipartisan deals, then in a strange way, maybe somebody like Debbie Dingell represents a fresh start.